THE LOWDOWN: LEEDS DIGITAL FESTIVAL

Monday 10th April 2017

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The 24th April 2017 marks the start of this year’s Leeds Digital Festival, which showcases a huge range of events running over a five day period.

More than 6,000 people attended the festival last year which included a total of 56 events, in 28 different venues in the city, with over 175 guest speakers brought together to celebrate everything great about all things digital in our city.

What can you expect this year?
This year is already set to be even bigger and better than the last. This year’s festival will be hosting more than 100 events and will be welcoming over 10,000 attendees.

Events that are expected to be highlights this year include some favourites from last year, including more from Fin Tech North, Northern UX conferences and Code in the Dark. Notable speakers include northern powerhouse minister Andrew Percy and the founder and CEO of one of the world’s most well-known websites – IMDB.

The digital festival is supporting all areas of tech in Leeds, and is supporting events that are tackling prevalent issues being felt in the industry.

Women In Tech
Women are highly outnumbered by men in the Tech industry, and recent years an increasing number of projects and groups have been set up with the aim of bridging the gender gap in the industry.

‘She does digital’: She does digital are a group based in Leeds working in the community to showcase the amazing careers digital has to offer.

The event titled #WhereDidIStart is aimed at anyone who is passionate or curious about technology. Both men and women! It will be held at the Adelphi on Wednesday 26th April and will feature talks from inspirational women in the tech industry, and will focus on their journey in the digital sector. The event will also give attendees the opportunity to meet other people from the tech industry in the city.

Film Screening – Code debugging the gender gap:One of the most powerful documentaries on women in tech, CODE - Debugging the Gender Gap, looks at the issues around the lack of female software engineers and explores the reasons for the gender gap. CODE raises the question about what would society gain from having more women who code. The film was an Official Selection at the Tribeca Film Festival and this is a free screening.

This is set to be a really interesting event and will also feature a presentation of results from some research into Tech Women in Leeds with some of the city's leading speakers on the topic.

Watch a trailer below...

Bridging the skills gap
it’s no secret that there is a significant skills gap present across the tech industry at the moment. The jobs are there but finding the right people with the correct and relevant skill set is proving difficult for many employers in the city.

Digital Jobs Action Summit:Tech North are following on from their success of last year’s Talent & Skills summit and inviting anyone who has a stake in skills to establish exactly what the North’s challenges are to create a Northern Digital Jobs strategy to present to the government.

The jobs action summit will give attendees the chance to meet local and national leaders in skills to share and understand what's working, hear from a diverse audience of learners, parents, educators, employers in traditional and digital industries, local and national government, and academics

Get an exclusive look at three new research reports, revealing the latest national, local and international research on this issue.

Leeds digital jobs fair: The third digital jobs fair will be held at Leeds Arena on Friday the 27th April.
“Leeds now has more than 600 digital vacancies and the new Leeds Digital Job Fair is your chance to meet 50 of the city's employers who are looking for: Developers, Designers, Product managers, Analysts, Digital Marketers, IT Specialists, Engineers, Account managers and more.”
Attendees of the job fair are given the opportunity to talk to some of the city’s biggest digital employers and get individual advice on how to succeed in their digital applications.

We’re also getting involved!
We’re excited to be a part of the Leeds digital festivities this year. We are holding the following events this year:

Hiring for digital skills: The challenge attracting and hiring digital talent in Leeds and Yorkshire is at an all-time high. We are opening our doors to companies of all sizes to provide help, advice and strategies on both hiring for digital professionals and also retaining them. Amsource Technology has a wealth of experience in helping companies to grow and develop their digital teams across Leeds and Yorkshire and these free-to-attend sessions will include role profile reviews, advice around adopting a through and relevant interview approach, and ways of attracting talent beyond traditional means.
Book a session by emailing us here.

Careers Clinic: Whether a Graduate or an experienced professional, searching for a new role requires you to be at your best with the ability to impress and communicate effectively. We will be opening up our offices to provide free advice to those professionals at all levels of experience who are currently seeking new opportunities. This will include a CV review, interview techniques and advise on how to develop your personal brand in the digital world.
LiveCode: in the Code Dojo:

Grant Crofton, Organiser of the Leeds Code Dojo explains: "Ever since we moved on from machine code, programmers have been looking for the next best abstraction to represent our systems. For a long time, objects seemed to fit the bill - conceptually simple, easy to work with, a good way to split up code. But with the move to increasingly server-based systems and the need for easy parallelisation, the functional style previously used only by beardy academics has stepped into the limelight.

Some say this functional nonsense is just a flash in the pan, the hipster programmer's flavour of the month. I mean, who wants to swap object hierarchies and encapsulation for closures and monads? Others say just because the world is made of objects doesn't mean our code should be - and besides, nobody really does proper OO anyway!

So which is the better paradigm, Object Oriented or Functional? On the night, we will find out once and for all!"